The present invention generally pertains to a system and method for monitoring any abnormality in an equine; e.g., identifying changes in the health-condition of equines, any change in the equines' normal behavior, detecting illness, allergies, colic, lack of sleep or too much sleep, and identifying getting cast.
Equines, particularly horses, can be prone to e.g., colic, which is the leading cause of death in horses; the incidence of colic in the general horse population has been estimated as between 10 and 11 percent on an annual basis. Even when not fatal, colic can be very uncomfortable for the horse and can be debilitating.
Prevalence of colic can be reduced by using care in the choice of feed for the horse and by ensuring that the animal has proper exercise. However, over 80% of colic cases in horses are idiopathic, i.e., with no known cause, meaning that colic very often strikes without warning, making early treatment difficult, especially if the colic strikes when the horse is in a large paddock or if the colic strikes at night.
Colic in a racehorse severe enough to need surgical intervention results, in the vast majority of cases, in the racehorse never properly recovering its form; the horse never again wins races.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,166,923 to Davies discloses an approach to monitoring, evaluation, diagnosis, treatment or conditioning of animals such as horses that does not require use of restrictive equipment such as treadmills or force plates and that can provide either or both of more or less immediate or continuous processing of data to perform the monitoring or diagnosis. One or more wireless sensors are attached to the animal, for example, to measure motion-related parameter associated with one or more parts of the animal. Sensor data is received from the sensors and processed to identify a characteristic of the motion of the animal, such as a quality of gait. The sensor data can also be used to avoid injury to the animal and/or the rider, and to verify the identity of an animal.
However Davies discloses sensors able to determine aspects of the gait of the animal by determining aspects of the motion of the animal's limbs, but does not determine the position of the animal.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,536,377 to Beaver discloses a system for detecting the relative inverted posture of an equine specimen. When such a posture, or positional attitude, of an equine specimen is greater than 90 degrees but less than 270 degrees as measured with respect to the rotation of the animal's body around the lateral axis—anterior to posterior—whereby the normal standing position of the animal is zero degrees, then a sensing switch will activate and transmit a corresponding radio frequency signal to a receiver at a remote location and sound an alarm to alert monitoring personnel.
However, the system of Beaver does not include a database of normal equine behavior, nor does it include recording of the behavior of the monitored animal, nor does it include any comparison of the animal's current behavior with either previous behavior by the same animal or by other animals. Furthermore, the system of Beaver can not distinguish between an animal rolling for pleasure or to scratch its back, and an animal rolling in pain.
It is therefore a long felt need to provide a system that can be mounted on the body of an equine for monitoring its behavior pattern and comparing said behavior pattern to the normal behavior of either that animal or other animals.